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First Place – “Little Norway”

“There it is,” she said.

“What”? I asked, startled from a reverie as I drove along Highway 18/151 between Madison and Dodgeville.

“The sign,” she said, grinning.

“What sign?”

“The one for Little Norway,” she giggled.

“Oh,” I said, focusing on my driving.

“Don’t you want to tell me the story again?” she asked. “About the experience that traumatized your childhood?”

“No,” I said. “Anyway, you know it as well as I do.”

“True,” she said. “I’ve certainly heard it enough times. But I’d like to hear it again. Tell me the story.”

“No,” I said. “I don’t want to. And I don’t find it all that funny.”

•••

Two years ago we had purchased a second home in Dubuque, an 1860 brick cottage situated on a rise with a view of the Mississippi River. We had kept our long-time home in Door County as a summer place while we spent winters in Dubuque, going south for the winter, we had joked among our friends, just not as far south as most people.

We had thought that we’d have a clean break as we made a seasonal move from one place to the other, but in reality obligations and interests took us back and forth much more frequently than we had envisioned. Subsequently, landmarks along the five and one-half hour trip became depressingly familiar, and sometimes we’d ride silently for hours, having long exhausted subjects of conversation.

One of those topics had been Little Norway, the scene of my “childhood trauma.” Located near Blue Mounds, Little Norway was one of dozens of reconstructed “authentic” traditional Norwegian villages in this country. For the price of admission, a costumed tour guide would walk a visitor through log buildings, many grass-roofed, scavenged from immigrant settlements and relocated to suggest once-upon-a-time life in Norway. The Blue Mounds location was hilly and wooded, reminiscent of an authentic Norwegian landscape, without the fjords, of course; except for an occasional lake or river, this part of Wisconsin is landlocked. The centerpiece of this particular Little Norway was a church disassembled in the home country, shipped to Blue Mounds, and reconfigured in the faux village.

Little Norway had been granted National Register of Historic Places status; our Civil War era house in Dubuque was denied a spot, because previous owners had added a family room. “So it goes,” Kurt Vonnegut would sigh, of this bit of Scandinavian history announced by a ticket booth, celebrated with a gift shop, and presided over by sullen local high school girls uncomfortable in their poly-blend dirndls.

“So you have never taken the tour of Little Norway?” my wife asked, egging me on.

“No,” I grunted. And then after a long pause. “I’ve gone on their website.”

“Maybe we could go there sometime,” she said. “It would be an easy daytrip from Dubuque.”

I grunted in response.

“It might be fun,” she teased.

“I have no intention of going to Little Norway,” I sputtered. “It’s about as culturally authentic as Al Johnson’s.”

The goats on the grass roof of Al Johnson’s Swedish Restaurant in Sister Bay had become the rock stars of tourist dining. Whenever we met people who found that we lived in Door County, invariably they would tell us about their visit to the vacation peninsula and proudly boast that they had eaten at the restaurant with the goats on the roof. “Did we know the restaurant?” they’d ask. “We had Swedish pancakes. With lingonberry jam!”

Did we know it! During the summer when we’d drive into the village to pick up our mail at the post office, we’d often find a traffic jam in front of Al Johnson’s as tourists clustered in the street attempting to find the perfect angle for taking souvenir photos of the bored goats waiting on the roof of the restaurant for the end of their work day when at last they’d be hauled in a trailer back to the barn and pasture where they’d have both privacy and the freedom to roam.

Local high school girls who worked at the restaurant routinely answered questions about their Swedish heritage, the goats on the roof, and the “ligonberry” bushes by the front entrance.

•••

“Did your uncle ever help with the haying?” my wife asked.

“Never!” I replied.

“I would think he’d want to help,” she said, and I took the bait. Once more I told the story of my ill-fated trip to Little Norway when I was a ten-year-old boy.

Every summer my Uncle Truman brought his wife Marcella and two children Donald and Annette to my parents’ farm for a week-long vacation. Uncle Truman enjoyed his sister’s cooking and a free place to stay while he took his family on side trips to the sights in the area. They left as soon as breakfast was finished and returned in time for evening supper. My parents’ reward, after my father had spent the day making hay and my mother cooking meals, was the opportunity to watch after the sun had gone down Uncle Truman’s home movies projected on our living room wall. Most of the footage was of Uncle Truman’s church Bible Quiz Team. Cousin Donald was on the squad and Uncle Truman was one of the coaches. While my father dozed, Uncle Truman would systematically identify the quiz team members, along with church parishioners who made cameo appearances, and give us a play-by-play account of the Bible Quiz Team’s series of competitions.

On Sunday we’d all go to my grandma’s church and afterwards have dinner at her home. My family dreaded the morning spent in the Free Methodist Church in Reedsburg because the service was long and inevitably meant a late meal, since the preacher seemed to get one second wind after another as he railed against those sinners who, forgetting their God and His promise of heaven, lasciviously entertained themselves by watching television with their wanton women who displayed themselves in short-sleeved dresses.

My Uncle Truman would sing as part of the worship service, obviously a highlight of his visit. One time he brought the box with his collection of songs for deep voices, but forgot the suitcase containing the family’s underwear. Aunt Marcella scolded him severely, but as she liked to shop at the Five and Dime, the inconvenience was not great even though she found the expense troublesome. She was a city girl born and bred, and could never be adequately entertained without an admission charge.

The shortage of ready cash proved a problem for the visit to Little Norway. Uncle Truman had brought my grandma on the outing, as well as my sister and me. In the ticket office, after noting the price of admission, the three adults quietly put their heads together. “I will wait in the gift shop with Howard and Alice Kay,” my grandmother announced when the huddle broke up.

And while Uncle Truman and his family re-connected with his heritage (one of his grandmothers had been Norwegian), my sister and I examined and re-examined the souvenirs offered for sale to those who wanted tangible evidence of their Norwegian past. Grandma, always the stoic, sat in the single wooden chair in the room and stared out the window at the make-believe hills of Norway.

Aunt Marcella, I realize in retrospect, was probably indignant at the thoughtlessness of my parents in not providing my sister and me with admission money, after she and my uncle had generously offered to take us with them on this outing.

•••

“But your family had been providing them with room and board for their vacation!” my wife exclaimed.

“Correct,” I said. “But my mother never minded, except when she was pregnant with my little brother and had to cook a big noon meal for my father, along with his brother and father, and then another big meal for supper. My father considered Uncle Truman a pansy and pretty much ignored him.”

Aunt Marcella was a different matter. She carried with her a persistent gloom that brought clouds to the brightest days. Uncle Truman never made enough money for them to achieve the lifestyle to which she felt she had been born. My cousin Donald seemed to be cut from the same fabric as my uncle, a clumsy graceless child who could memorize Biblical trivia, but met with little success in other aspects of his life.

Cousin Annette, on the other hand, was the mirror image of Aunt Marcella as a little girl, lovely, delicate and precocious. As she was a fussy eater, Aunt Marcella hovered over her urging her to eat, trying to tempt her with morsels of her favorite foods. Once when we children were in bed asleep and the adults were having a snack before they turned in, my mother served cheese and crackers.

“Oh,” Aunt Marcella sighed, “Annette loves cheese!” After considerable fretting, she awakened her daughter and set her at the table to enjoy cheese, but as the child did nothing but rub her eyes and whine, Aunt Marcella reluctantly put her back to bed.

Unfortunately her older child never stood up straight, never tucked in his shirttails, and never showed the promise on his accordion that Annette would certainly eventually reveal on her violin.

“And you no longer hear from Annette?” my wife asked.

“No one does, including her parents,” I replied. “The last my mother heard Annette ran off with a black woman, left the church, and is living as a lesbian somewhere in the Arizona.”

“Really,” my wife said.

I nodded. “And you remember Donald’s Christmas card?”

“I do,” she said. “Really bizarre!”

“It was,” I agreed. “He had had, a heart attack, was it?”

“I think so,” she said.

“Anyway, he was preaching a funeral, I believe, when he had his health problem, was taken to a hospital, and then once he was released, friends had to drive him some distance home. And then this entire experience caused him to re-examine his life. He

decided that because of his home life as a child that he had developed a poor self-concept, and that finding Jesus in his heart had helped him to gain self-acceptance.”

“It was a strange Christmas letter,” she said. “It made you feel uncomfortable just reading it. As young people would say, TMI! Should you be sharing this with everyone on your Christmas card list!”

“I know. His life as a Free Methodist Minister was not one I would have chosen.”

My wife started laughing. “I’m trying to imagine you as a Free Methodist Minister!”

“Remember,” I said, “you’d be married to me. And you’d have to resign yourself to a life of long sleeves and no MSNBC television!”

“Wrong there!” she said. “If you had been a Free Methodist Minister, I wouldn’t have glanced in your direction, much less agree to marry you!”

“I guess I’m lucky I’m a heathen.”

“You are,” she laughed, and leaned across the seat to kiss me on the cheek. “So, next summer we have a date for Little Norway?”

“I’m afraid you would be stood up,” I laughed.

“Waiting in the gift shop?” she asked.

“I’m holding out for Big Norway,” I smiled, enigmatically, “where I’ll don skis, a snowflake sweater, and as a Norweyan prince leave Uncle Truman behind me in a dust of fresh powder.”

Gary Jones is a writer who with his wife of many years spends summers in Door County and winters teaching at UW – Platteville.

Judge’s Comments:

The breezy, unaffected tone of this piece makes it a joy to read, and sharp dialogue moves it along. The story within a story illuminates a childhood trauma – relatable in how it captures a seemingly small gesture burned into memory. Best of all, the author’s command of detail around character and place fits simply and elegantly against the backdrop of a long drive across the state.